Alexandru Dabija’s performance, “The Visit to he Father” has a unique stylistic, materialised by scenographer Helmut Stürmer into a large room of an old house, in the generous space of the former Gym in the Timisoara Civic Park. Peter, the son (Colin Buzoianu) returns in mid winter in the house his father, Helmut (Damian Oancea), whom he has never met before. Alexandru Dabija thus goes, in the performance staged at the National Theatre “Mihai Eminescu”, after Roland Schimmelpfennig's play translated by Ciprian Marinescu, into the details of the conflict between a father and a son that he also previously investigated in “Back Home”, after a Mimi Brănescu’s play at the Act Theatre.
The dispute stems from the fact that the son nonchalantly seduces, almost at the same time, no fewer than three women in the house, all of different ages: his stepmother, Edith (Victoria Suchici Codricel), her niece, Sonia (Alina Reus) and Edith's daughter from a previous marriage, Marietta (Claudia Ieremia).
From the very beginning, the performance is placed under the bad omen of a reply related to “those fractions of seconds where you can see everything - everything in store for you”, envisaging the drama in the old house of the Anglicistics professor, Helmut, who has been translating for ten years John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”.
When Helmut’s son, Peter arrives in shabby winter clothes, which does not suit him although, in his eccentricity, he is convinced of the exact opposite, the life of the three women in the house changes fundamentally. “When I sleep with a woman, I don’t necessarily think that I am Adam and her Eve”, meditates Peter, the vindictive son, dellusionally trying to find his place, and not only his, in the string of men from Adam, Cain, Jabal, Jubal, Seth, and then from Noah and his sons on, that is to say from all the sons of God who are the ancestors of all people on earth.
In the performance in Timisoara we are haunted by the myth about Adam and Eve in another
“paradise lost”, in an interpretation on several psychological levels, in which actors juggle with the weapons of seduction, tolerance and devastating rejection.
The characters bring out one at a time their psychological flaws, and the actors in Timisoara, under the delicate but firm baguette of Dabija, metamorphose as episodes follow quickly, making such complex and abysmal compositions, with mirrors turned onto the most intimate corners of their own consciousness and resources, on classical tones by Haydn, Shubert or Molvaer.
The contradictory characters, equally contemporary and Chekhovian, make up a kaleidoscope of tensions staged in sequences and at an alert pace by Alexandru Dabija in a classic scenery, with large mirrors. The room opens on one side, through a window, onto a porch. Several doors suggest the presence of several rooms and labyrinthine corridors, and even a kitchen.
In the role of the mother, Victoria Suchici Codricel, just like Sanda Toma, in “All My Sons” staged at the National Theatre in Bucharest, has a spectacular comeback after an absence of several years. At 60, with two daughters, Isabel and Marietta, from two different marriages, Edith contortedly, nevertheless bravely, faces her own sexuality. “I dreamed that I was sleeping with my husband's son. At first it was so beautiful to lay my hand on his young body and do whatever I wanted with it, and I wanted to be totally his, but he had a weird way of biting my breasts which hurt so badly I burst into tears, but I still wanted to...“, confesses Edith in one of the few monologues highlighting the turmoil, anxiety, paroxysmal tension in the construction of the character.
The 65 years old father, who grew old labouring on his translation of “Paradise Lost” by John Milton, fell in love with his niece, Sonia, who joins him on a duck hunt. He even proposes to her to give her a son; only that Sonia slips through his fingers. The character of the troubled girl, embodied by expressive Alina Reus, which I also seen playing the role of the nanny in “Romeo and Juliet”, wants so much to become a mother, that she would have accepted even old Helmut. It is dramatic how Peter's disappointment, preferred to the father, makes Sonia say utterly, through Alina Reus’s eyes that actually throw out flames of hatred, that she will tear out with the scissors from her womb his potential child, as if she was not inseminated with sperm, but with sulphuric acid.
The other childless women in the house are also tensed spectres that reached the limit of their own supportability: a Marietta in loose clothes, as well as a rocker Isabel (Malina Manov). Helmut and Edith’s youngest daughter, a 20 years old, only sees the world through the interface of a mobile phone, only wanting to escape that “bleak house” for her inconsistent dream of becoming an actress that has nothing in common with the kid “only good for fucking”.
However, the existential dilemma of the family concerns a shot duck. The bird's head swings from one side to the other, and drops of blood drip on newspapers and spread everywhere. Three people walk around, not knowing what to do with the dead animal. They either start plucking its feathers, or trim them with the scissors around the neck, while Maria Callas’ voice, in “Don Giovanni” by Mozart or “Samson and Delilah” by Camille Saint-Saëns, rises to maximum intensity from the gramophone discs. duck feathers and fluff fly everywhere, while frost flowers shine stronger and stronger in Stürmer’s scenery.
Eventually, the father strongly pulls the entrails out, and dirt covers the floor. Shit! Shit! Shit!, that's all that remains, in a scene of an atrocious naturalism, although Helmut, embodied by a crushed Damian Oancea, comforts himself at the idea that the ancient Greeks read the humiliation of their future in birds entrails.
In Dabija’s view, the red of blind sexuality, the striking blood, the deeper darkness, the feathers and shit surrounds us from all sides. Storms, shadows, cruel lights successively and ghostly come over the old house, with the psychological mess and the spiritual mutilation of the characters. As if it were not enough, episodes in the drama of the former German Democratic Republic, torn between East and West, are remembered by a teacher (Irene Flamann Catalina) and by the obese student Nadia (Mirela Puia), her daughter, who, reaching a stage of apocalyptic mental excitation throws out, running concentrically at a dizzying pace, first editions of “The Brothers Karamazov”, “Anna Karenina” or “The Insulted and Humiliated”. This is how the snow mixes, without appeal, valuable books, once insulted into a room, signed by Gogol, Gorky, Turgenev, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov.
But not even the flames in the snow can cover the frustration and all the dirt, which extended into the consciousnesses scattered on the mirrors on the walls from the entrails of the duck. “Later we all sat in the garden, in the snow, and tried to burn the bird, but it did not burn properly. So we tried to bury it, but we couldn't because the ground was frozen. And then I found the books in the snow, hundreds of books”, says Sonia, through the distraught voice of Alina Reus, about the death of the duck and Russian literature.
Playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig, with two other plays staged in Romania, “Arabian Night” and “The Woman Before”, worked with director Thomas Ostermeier at the Schaubühne Theatre, and is one of the most played German authors. The play staged in Timisoara open the theodicy “The Animal Trilogy”, which continues with “The Animal Kingdom” and “End and Beginning”. In the tradition of Thomas Bernhardt, Elfriede Jelinek or Marius von Mayerburg, Schimmelpfennig writes gloomy and viscerally about the reverberations of the hereditary sin, feelings of guilt or compulsions repressed in devastating psychological adjustments. And yet, in his writing, Chekhov's marks remain present everywhere, from the poetry of the bitter words to the heart-rending silences. The umbrellas of the Chekhovian sisters, threatened by gun powder, continue to haunt, “The Visit…" oppressively over the consciousness of Schimmelpfennig's characters, but also over our own counsciousness, especially after the prodigal son, banished from the illusory and incestuous “paradise” of his women, turns his back on us and vanished into the night.
